Things Are Afoot

Five years ago I wrote about the rather testosterone heavy collection of statues in Parliament Square which includes such luminaries as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd-George and Nelson Mandela. Since then, there has been the addition of Mahatma Gandhi in 2015, and a couple of weeks ago was the unveiling of the square’s latest bronze resident, which I wanted to mention.

This year (2018) marks the 100th anniversary of ‘The Representation of the People Act 1918’ which was passed by the then coalition government to reform the electoral system in Great Britain and Ireland. Prior to 1918, only adult men who owned property had been eligible to vote. These new laws gave universal suffrage to all men in the UK over the age of 21, and crucially, for the first time, women …albeit with a number of caveats. The right to vote was only granted to women over the age of 30 who were registered property owners with a value over £5, or married to someone who was. About 8.4 million women who had previously had no political voice, now had the right to vote. It would be another 10 years before women had equal suffrage to men, but none-the-less, the Act of 1918 was a huge step forward in the march for women’s rights and was the result of decades of campaigning.

Some of the women instrumental in pushing the cause, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel used high profile direct action to grab attention and highlight inequality. Emily Davison, died in 1913 from injuries sustained after she threw herself beneath King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby and Mary Richardson slashed a painting at the National Gallery. Many women were imprisoned or went on hunger strikes for their cause.

One woman, who was a leading figure in the women’s suffrage movement, shunning militant and provocative tactics for moderation and debate was Millicent Fawcett, and she was honoured recently with a statue in Parliament Square. Not only is it the first statue of a woman to be placed on this prominent site outside the Houses of Parliament, but the first to be made by a woman; Turner Prize winning artist Gillian Wearing.

Fawcett spent a staggering six decades of her life fighting for equal rights, and is depicted carrying a banner which reads “Courage calls to courage everywhere”, a line from a speech she gave following the death of Emily Davison. The plinth on which the 8ft 4inch statue of Fawcett stands, bears the faces of 59 others who also fought tirelessly for women’s right to vote.

It seems almost fitting that Millicent Fawcett died in 1929 at the age of 82, a year after women were granted the vote on equal terms to men; the cause she had spent her entire adult life fighting for.